A treasure swept away by the Possessors, our lady, a descendant of a race of telepaths similar to them so that she could apprehend everything, the flood of our longing, the lustful and needful thoughts like tracer fire skidding across the consciousness which she gave to the visiphones. Her parents were unknown, the legends said. She had been found abandoned, adopted at birth by the nurturing institutions who sprung her telepathy from its locked-away place and made it bloom no less than the flowers and purchase of her being. This is what the holographs told us, what the advisers said; how much of this was true, whether Louisiana Toy, no less than the emotions and actions she placed over the visiphone, was “real” we cannot know, but ultimately it does not matter. If there has been one lesson to be absorbed from the fourteen centuries of guilt and abomination before at last the collapse of which we read it is this: that there is no difference between what exists and what we would have exist that cannot be patched over by technology, lies, the insistence of our dreams. Even the fourteen centuries themselves must come into dispute; there are those who will argue for fifteen, others saying that fourteen millennia would not truly apprehend the situation. So the arguments go on and on in their echoing and imprecise fashion, but of the lady’s true torment and distress we can only speculate in this chronicle.
We can speculate, but the speculation itself is true; what we would have is what will exist, or so the Possessors told her during the disgusting months of her captivity and indoctrination. We can get no nearer her distress, that distress is part of a story which — were it cataloged would become appallingly sentimental and would then involve the necessity of discussing the seventeen hundred worlds, the politics of genocide which led only to the mild fracture of the Republics (genocide being only another arm of policy), the corruption of the lost judges, the nefarious and wretched spin of dispersion which had made the occupation and performance of the damaged Stan Montana and those in his trade essential to any realpolitick of that long surpassed century which we can consider only as paradigm. Image of an image, dusk of a night, there was the Lady Louisiana Toy, telepathic treasure, her bosom of lace and dreams hurled heavenward in a trillion reproductions to the storming gates of Montana’s lust. Louisiana Toy, actress and saint, Mother of God and cruel partisan of the lost spirit, Mary and Medusa and Medea and Electra and a thousand other icons as well, taken from the very center of her being and laid out for us, just as the Possessors — that stem and damaged lupine race of telepaths and technophiliac monsters — took her then to the cold and distant heart of their own galaxy. It was only at that point that the practicalities commenced; the initial crime had been so audacious, so furious and — somehow beyond conception as to deny paraphrase. The demands were issued, of course, through telepathic beam and — for the rest of us who were not telepaths — the lesser systems of transports.
They were blackmail, of course, they were insouciant and outrageous. Even in what the inhabitants of this period thought of as “advanced times” the rockets yet crawled between the stars while in the bowels of those machines creatures whose pain and appearance were unspeakable and thus unknown to the passage hammered and stoked the slow fires of increase While trying not to be consumed by the FTL drives and trying to make of the universe a small, elegant, somehow comprehensible business. The messages crawled with the rockets then, the telepathic waves crackling only to the very few who could· understand them and who (by the prejudicial and murderous nature of this age) could not reveal their telepathic capacity.
For only at the cutting edge — this is an interpolation and it may be forgiven for its relevance ultimately will become clear — does one feel the rush of possibility, does the interface of history and condition, threat and desire, need and damage become somehow fused and resistible. The rest of us stagger in the dark of our desire like rockets crawling at slower than light speeds through the ridges of space. All of what we do is controlled by our ignorance; in the flickering instants of Lady Louisiana Toy’s image we may feel that something different is possible, but it is not possible and that understanding bounds everything we do.
Had the Possessors had the true wherewithal or means which they threatened, had they, too, not been bound to the sublight speeds of the stokers, none of this would have happened, they would have been invulnerable. But their vulnerability was sealed by the fact that telepathy was not a universal gift, they had to proceed in the language of their inferiors or not function at all. Had the case been different, the likes of the hapless Stan Montana would never have been engaged. He would not have lived to function. But the Possessors. were trapped in the glue of their constancy, the very ether itself contained them.
Ultimately it was not their age after all. It was the age of Stan Montana.
For Montana lived, even at this sprawling and unspeakable time, at the margins of all possibility. Ungifted by an interior, deprived of coherent or reasonable thought, he scuffed into his clothing, made his arrangements with prostitutes, heaved and unloaded his discharge of semen or necessity, collaborated with any who would hire him, engaged on the most dubious and slimiest of deeds which at this or any time at all still comprises the text and sorrow of life. In the twenty-ninth century (where this does not take place) or the thirty-fifth, in the ninth or the unspeakable billionth millennium, the business with which Montana was engaged will go on. One will find him here and there, at this or any other point of the past, pounding his fist against tables, ordering his feet to move even when they would die on him, bribing the ships’ porters or space jockeys in the holes of the rapt Beltegeuse system to yield small bits of information on adulterous pursuit. His whine of release maybe heard in the dives or alleyways of the millionth planet, his plans and formulations scrambled like Kilroy’s upon walls so distant that we cannot imagine them.
For this, then: Stan Montana and no one else, not even the Lady herself, must be seen as the abcissa upon which the stars themselves tum, he is at the center of our condition now and forevermore, and it must be admitted that he was as stunned and distracted by the news of the Lady’s abduction as any of us. Perhaps he was more shaken because in ways that he, too, could not have known he had secretly loved her, dreamed, of her body, confessed to her image, kept her holograph along with the ever ready but certainly unconscious primal scene close to him in the dark and inelegant pause of his nights. If Stan Montana did not then love Louisiana Toy, he came as close to that as any simulacrum of “love” could be known in the spaceyards and boneyards of this disastrous age which we are forced to remember as the last time when it was possible to come together through the transceiver, to find a kind ofcommunity, to understand anything. They had selected Stanley Montana to seek the Possessors and recover Louisiana Toy because, they said (“they” involving the massed governments and corporate entities of that time who interpreted the kidnapping as the most audacious infliction yet upon their perilous way of life, and so they were able for the duration of this crisis to work together in a kind of unity) he lacked subtlety, lacked understanding of any kind, lacked — as we have been pointing out from the earliest part of this recollection — any significant interior life. He obviously knew nothing and therefore he had a chance with·the Posessors which heavier and more sophisticated help — with genuine technological knowledge. With something approxitimating an interior monologue — could not have possessed.
“You are stupid enough not to know that you must fail,” was the way they explained matters to Stanley Montana when they put her holograph and last known whereabouts in his hands and sent him spinning clumsily on his journey to seek the Lady and somehow return her. “You have absolutely no conception of what is against you therefore you may succeed.” is what they said and this was probably far more than was necessary, but they gave him this much at least as he was sent out. With him rode the fate of suns for Louisiana Toy, as the Possessors knew and those who defended her interest, were responsible for her condition, was at the secret heart of all purpose, she was no metaphor but a constancy; It was
this constancy which granted her the power she held.
Her body was the primal vault of the galaxies themselves, at least as they had been rearranged, in her ovaries she carried the imploded hearts of suns and other galactic debris which need not be further evaluated in this context. A universal figure, a truly generating force, a metaphor gone so lucidly explosive that she had beep forced to become an entertainer simply as a means of controlling her visibility, if she was on the transceivers they knew at least where she was and could track her movement at all times. Of the dangers, the climactic risks, the sheer lunacy of allowing the Galactic Riddle to become a holograph for the billions we need not speak, it is of course this lunacy itself which gave the age its divination and truest madness and not to apprehend this is to miss the point; further explication is not necessary. They owed Montana no part of the truth and did not give it to him. What difference would the truth have made? By the same reasoning, the truth is a part of this narrative only when it is of a momentary sufficiency, it must be left to other sources to explain how the galactic riddle had been placed into such a position. Of the reckoning and madness of that age we can ourselves make no judgdment.
“Go, then, and find her,” they said to Stanley Montana. “Recover her, find her for us, bridge the gate of telepaths, and return the Lady Louisiana Toy to the hearts of those now bereaved.” They added little to this essential imprecation and sent him away, promising rich compensation but only if he were successful and giving proper impetus in the form of the holograph and the promise they whispered to him in parting, he promise that they knew would work if anything would.
“For you may have her,” they whispered. “She can be yours at last. Find her, shield your thoughts and purpose from the Possessors who would otherwise apprehend them. Find where she has been hidden, bring her back to us and we will put her in a room with you. There you may close the door and you may enact upop her — shall we say this, do we dare? — anything you wish. Anything of your description, anything you can imagine, that and more and we will help you. She is love, she is loving, she is the one who has always been in search of a handsome operative like you. She lusts for your need even as you and a billion others have prayed to her.”
What is there to say? What is there to be made of such mischief as this? They lied to him, of course, but they lied no less than that which had beep the modicum of social and sexual intercourse for all of the indefinable history and in the stacks of deceit from which had beep tossed the sprawling galaxies, the quarks and their boneyards, how awful is their lie! Looking at the tablelands we have found now, is this the worst of all the evils which life has perpetrated upon life? It was at least for a good purpose. Purpose was all. Sincerity was a counterfeit, simply a position. And this Stanley Montana himself must have known for he had whispered to himself that confidence in all of the silent places as he had plodded his way through the small interstices of his tiny necessities. “Mean streets, mean doings,” he had confided to himself. “Someone must always solve a murder; unearth the truth, find the wrongdoer, relieve the damaged, give comfort to the sick. Just as an army must always search, destroy, and occupy, so a man must take on the burdens of his time.
“I am good I am good,” Stanley Montana would praise himself in those last chants before sleep, “I am of a necessity I am here to save, I act bad but I do good.” Of this and so many other small deceptions we must be accepting then, seek complaisance; he suffered for us after all, Stanley Montana lived and died — multiplied by the millions! — for those of us who have, however, equivocally survived and if there are no explanations for this — well, then, there are no possibilities as well. One must equate one must show mercy in order to gain advantage or so at least has been another of the difficult lessons which (forever unlearned by the rest of us) have been the contemptible and limited total of all the burnt suns, all the progression of disaster and pain up to the time of these events. Or beyond.
But this, too, begins to edge into the theology of the Possessors, a race whose telepathy had created as one could imagine a complex teleological basis not really to be equated with our own numbed worship of disbelief ... their group purposes, intense gestalt, cynicism and retrieval does not really fit into this chronicle any more than Stanley Montana’s halting and stumbling efforts to find them. We must — like the Possessors, but With a different ascription to the word “faith” — take all of those deductive efforts of Montana with a kind of faith. He plodded and plotted (not through thought, through tropism as we must often be reminded) through the corridors of the dark and hidden passageways between the stars to find the Lady Louisiana Toy. And this, the nature of this quest must be seen as the evil and secret genius of those who had assigned him (in despair, of course, but With a kind of cunning) to the task: his thoughts his ploddings and tropistic scuttle could not be read by the assiduous Possessors, eager as they might have been to understand him because Stan Montana had no thoughts. His processes could not be deduced because there were none, there was only that small core of purpose, the low, flickering flame of his desire to get behind the door and read the faces, this codified by dim possession. On and on he prowled, doing the best he could, doing what he must as the stars curled in their traces and the Possessors cackled with the slow realization of their desire, demanding ransom then and performing unspeakable acts which like so much else need not be summarized here.
No, of the nature of the Lady’s captivity of those acts performed upon and inside her during that terrible period of her captivity, we will not speak. Such a report would only be distressing to Stanley Montana, his residue and descendants (we are all, of course, his descendants) and would play little role in what is, for all of its tortuous rhetoric and sly inference, quite a simple recapitulation. It is a recapitulation as simple as Stan Montana himself, because we are not dealing with complex figures here, we are doing with a man of no interior life, a lady who was an icon and a telepathic net but whose own interior had been gutted from her so that the wires could be placed and she could become a vehicle for the necessity of others. Understand that long before the Possessors had taken their toll there were others who had touched the child Louisiana Toy and played with her, jiggled her insides and known her outside, filled all of her tender and vulnerable being with disgusting thoughts, human and panicky needs, hints of desolation, desolate and lasting purposes: she was assigned early to her task of enacting for all of the galaxies what they most wanted. Pictures were drawn inside and outside her heart and on the walls of her cell, she had been in a cell long before the Possessors then and the effect of her imprisonment was most equivocal. She had seen it all before.
Still there was that need for her to be shown, for the demonstration to be made. From time to time then the Possessors would take Louisiana Toy to the arena they had constructed for just this purpose and there she was compelled before, a stunned audience of several billion, all that they could summon to this greatest of all links, to reenact aspects of her life and anticipated death for their edification and amusement. She was not an actress, what she did was something far beyond acting and in the sands cast before her Louisiana Toy did what they wanted, knowing that she was giving back to them what from the first had always been in the contract. She bad never expected any different. If Stan Montana had expected everything, the Lady had — by charm and essence his doubled opposite — expected nothing at all. So she went through what she must and it is generally conceded by those who witnessed the events and made transcription at that time that these were indeed the greatest, the most memorable and shocking of all her performances.
The ransom demands were of course subordinate. Did the Possessors ever expect them to be met? One must doubt this, all of it was posturing, an excuse for the abuse and the inch by inch shrieking extraction of Louisiana Toy’s memory. Worlds were demanded, then more worlds, then the flaming captive hearts of undiscovered stars which yet more worlds insidiously circled, then at last in an act of sheer audacious loathing the Possessors dem
anded the great Troast Lock itself with its billion suns; flaming passions, untold worlds of slavery and treasure. They demanded not only the Lock but the complete submission of all who were to be heaped up in the heat of the stars as untainted treasure. It was impossible. From the very start now, it was clear, the Possessors had never had any intention but the final evisceration of Louisiana Toy and the rupturing of her link. How it had taken so long to ascertain their purposes was not known, but now there could be no doubt.
The disciples and creators of Louisiana Toy; her lovers, those who had not known her at all but themselves had somehow been touched, all of them, the totality of witness in the billions was left with nothing to say nothing to be done. Grasping at last the full audacity and cruelty of the Possessors, they had been shocked beyond response, moved beyond edification. Had they been telepathic in the fullest sense — but only the Possessors and their captive and a few sterile mutants in this narrative were, that must be understood, what we encompass here are the trillions of dumb, enclosed minds excluded from the cold Circle of communion — had they been telepathic then, they would have been struck insensate,cleaved from their very powers. The hopelessness was that absolute, the devastating intention of the Possessors that clear. But in the absence of telepathy, knowing only empathy then and witness to the sufferings of Louisiana Toy, those that could weep did so … and the others — but what is there to be said of the others? There are always such. At the moment of Crucifixion, the horse and rider carry on, sail out of the clear frame of the picture in the Beaux Arts Museums of our souls.
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 47